It Looks Great It Is Great And Its Free!

Just saw that Opera 9.1 is free! It might be old news for some people here but it was not for me.
I tried it out and I must say it rocks.

Very easy to customize, fast and lots of really ueful features.

http://www.opera.com/

ehh… I’ll stick with FireFox :)

Opera has always been free. It used to be my browser of choice until Firefox came along and swept me off my feet. I sometimes wonder what life would be like if I had stayed with Opera… sigh Then I remember the constant fighting, the booze, the mental abuse…

I remember you had to pay for it. Perhaps that was years ago?

I´m using all of em but I do think I opera most so far.
Perhaps I prefer it so far because it reminds me of Renoise :)

Anyway? What do you think are the pros and cons of the browsers?

Mozilla User since 2001 (CVS-stuff ;) ) although opera has its advantages.

I switched from Firefox to Opera when the free version without ads was released. I’m happier now. Firefox is good, but feels a bit clumsy to me.

The bookmark management just rules, the transfer window is neat (FireFox “feels like IE” in that respect, bleagh), the extensive use of drag and drop is great… and there are so many nifty things to discover even after a while: just today I realized that the “view page source” window has an “apply changes” button! I can’t think of any use I would have for that right now - but it makes sense and probably was easy to implement, so they implemented it in a slick way. That’s Opera for me, and I’m using it for nearly 7 years now.

People mentioning it in one sentence with FF doesn’t upset me anymore, it just makes me shake my head and return to being productive. If you use the Web more than casually you owe yourself digging into Opera, that’s my opinion.

This one is really useful! Thanks.

I tried Opera a while back, when they had this offer of a free key and shortly after that made it free. Switched back to Firefox again, since it was a lot more customizable than Opera.

Hahha!

that addon looks promising, :)
just installed it.

i use this addon/extension on all my FF installs:
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/722
it’s kinda a pain sometimes, tho since FF is so popular now. it’s basically a must have.
i gotta say tho FF2 is a dream! the included spell checking is very nice. Very forward thinking. even bought the tshirt! :P

dam this is a thread jack innit!

i know ive installed Opera at least once, i think maybe it was included with Suse in the late 1990’s (when i first started with Linux)
it’s funny how some things just dont take while others flourish so much the umbrella shoots into the sky.

Webdesign and especially AJAX is simply a pain in the ass without Firebug. I love Firebug and of course the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick :)

I switched from FF to Opera. I prefer Opera, but the difference is not that big. FF has its own strengths with the extensions and all…
Opera needs some little tweaking (settings) once installed, tho, to make it feel right. I was not attracted to it by the “first sight”.

One annoying thing I remember in FF is that it opens a new window sometimes. Opera never ever opens a new window, unless you want to.
And installing some extensions to FF is pretty much a must if you want to browse comfortably, while Opera has some more built in stuff.

Firebug is awesome!

I have a question though… Are there any tools that allows you to use a locally stored css file instead of the one on the server?

What I mean is this: I go to www.some-random-site.com. This site has orange text on a red background so I try to find a better color scheme by playing around with some-css-file.css in firebug. I decide that black text on white background is easier to read so now I would like to be able to view the site like this every time I go there.

Is there any tool that would allow me to make a rule like:
If “any page” on “www.some-random-site.com” calls “some-css-file.css” then read “c:.…\edited-css-file.css” instead. ?

try this:

Tools => Options => Content => Fonts and Colors => Advanced
uncheck the checkbox

Tools => Options => Content => Fonts and Colors => Colors
uncheck the checkbox

Thanks for the effort but that was not quite what I was looking for. I should have made it more clear that I was interested to know if it is possible to override css specifically. Reading my post again I must admit that it might seem as if I wanted to change colors only. :D

Good post. I tried both and I chose Opera. Why? Here is few points:

  • Opera has better code - try to click on page with MiddleButton on longer page and try to scroll it down or up. You will notice how smooth is goes on Opera and compare it with the same page but in FFox

  • Opera has fantastic Zoom + / - and * for default. FFox has the same but it has some terrible plugins and will have to configure its zoom very hard. :(

  • Opera has Torrents and Chat support by default

  • Opera has great shortcuts → just hit key “1” for previous tab and “2” for next one, while the same in FFox you will have to click CTRL+TAB for next and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB [three keys!?] to jump on previous tabs!

  • Opera has the best shortcut key ever → CTRL+H for HIDE! For example, you are at work, browsing w/ Opera and then your chief enters the room… and you Hide it quickly (: he he

  • When you close TAB in Opera, hit UNDO [ctrl+z] and closed tab will be back! In FFox you`ll have to open history and see latest link…

  • Opera can zoom Flash sites completely, YouTube videos too and any other videos, while I couldn`t manage it to get working in FFox?

  • Zooming works with holding CTRL and mouse scroll up / down and reverts to original size when click CTRL and middle mouse button.

  • when you are on page with many links or forums and dont want to use mouse, you can go with Shift + cursor keys from link to the link visually, while on FFox youll have to use several keys [shift, ctrl+shift and tabs] to go links up or down]

  • Opera has great movement gestures and I think is much better coded & has great default skin than FFox…? [Looks like iMac, has candy buttons] while FFox has a bit old-fashioned design by default?

  • Opera has fantastic bookmarking style - add page to bookmarks and add shortcut key for page to load. For example, I hit G and get Google page. I enter “gg” in address line and I`ll get google email with passwords… “u” for you tube and so on… Great thing I miss very very much in FFox…!? [maybe there is a plugin for it?]

  • Opera has excellent pop-up menu when click tiny line far to the left of the screen [or use shortcuts to open it]

  • Opera has great looking & working transfers, resuming works on everything I tried to download, while the same happens on special window in FFox, which is not ok to me…?

  • Opera has speech → mark some part of text on the screen and hit V - voice will be spoken (: [just need to download 10 mb plugin first]

… hm… did I miss something?

  • BUT… FFox is more compatible with html…

I believe FFox is good and MAYBE Im wrong, but PLEASE let me know if Im wrong and point me on some good things I probably don`t see in FireFox?!?

Thanx (:

Things I don’t like about Opera:

The bookmark management system is awful. In order to do anything significant with the bookmarks, you have to open a panel. You can’t right click a bookmark and change its properties–you have to use their menuing system in a panel. I’m not a big fan of panels because they resize the webpage, and I like the webpage to fill as much of the screen as possible.

They don’t supply you with a Home button right off the bat unless you use the Start Bar, which means that you have to click on the address bar first which brings up the start bar before clicking on Home, then back inside the page to get rid of the start bar–that’s three clicks with the mouse just to get to your home page. There are other ways of doing this–through tools/appearance/buttons/browser, then drag the home button next to the refresh button (of course nowhere in the menu does it say drag-and-drop). In order to make a new tab open the home page, you have to go to a special webpage from Opera that you can’t find out about through any help option–you must go to the message board just to find out where the option is, and in the process you’ll get a lot of hateful responses because you want to use Opera differently than the way it came, but here’s a link to it so you don’t have to get all the hateful responses: http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#alternate

If you come across a news feed, Opera will not display it correctly in the webpage window (it will look like plain text)–you MUST subscribe to a feed and view it in the feed viewer which is part of the email client that comes with Opera that you can’t disable. Disabling the built-in BitTorrent client requires a whole lot of steps as well.

I guess my biggest complaint is that they cram all this extra crap into the browser that I don’t use–I wish there was such a thing as Opera Lite.

Oh yeah, one more complaint–in order to keep Opera from becoming your default email client when you click on an email link, you have to go to tools/preferences/advanced/programs and select “mailto”, edit, and select “Open with default application”. Either way, after you install Opera you also have to go back to your default email client (thunderbird, OE, etc.) and say yes when it asks whether you want it to be your default email client.

Now–after all that, Opera is still the browser I use regularly. When I run into a news feed, I right click, copy the link location, and open it in Firefox. The other times I use Firefox is when there’s a youtube video that I’m sure will be deleted soon, so I use an addon to download it.

Yep, that’s a lot of complaints about Opera, but until Firefox adds a magnify option like what Opera has, I’ll still be using Opera.

EDIT: If you’re wondering what I use magnify for–it’s when only a tiny picture is available of something, or when one of those news sites have silly page formatting that makes the entire article in a long 2-3 inch column as if it’s in a printed newspaper, which is about 1 of every 5 news pages I go to, linked to from Google News. I don’t know why it’s taking Firefox so long to adopt what both Opera and IE have had for quite some time, but it is the primary thing that keeps me from using it–that and up until recently, Firefox had a bug that would get the mode of typing in a form confused with when you’re not typing in a form, so often times when you hit the apostrophe key when typing in a form, it would bring up the find option, that and CTRL+C CTRL+V page-up page-down home end and delete would often not work. They finally fixed this problem just a few months ago–so it seems that I’ll probably switch back soon if I can find a plugin that handles magnify like Opera and IE7 do.

EDIT EDIT: The only time I ever use IE is for updates, after I turn on the 4 windows services required to get them, one of them having to be set for Automatic because just having it on and set for Manual isn’t good enough for Microsoft. Generally, I never use IE–it lets far too much spyware in, and their proprietary ActiveX controls are something I try to stay away from as much as possible. The whole reason for most windows updates is so IE won’t be vulnerable. The only updates I download are the critical ones. Can you tell I’m NOT a Vista user? :) And I won’t be until the DRM, call home (microsoft), and other intrusive stuff can be completely removed.

You can press f4 to toggle this panel… which makes all your stuff very ez to access and very ez to hide.

Personally, I don’t use a homepage because I would need like 10 different homepages… so I just use bookmarks.

but you could just set a bookmark at the top of your bookmark list so you can get back to your homepage in like… 1 click…

or even better… you could assign a key to that homepage so you press it and you get your homepage… thats even faster than firefox…

but what I would do is just like what you said, you drag and drop the home button where you want it… whats wrong with this? I love how Opera is customisable…

Why would you disable a feature that makes you able to uninstall a software from your computer and deal with torrents just like they were normal files?

Just because its all-in-one, opera is the best torrent client

It takes about 5 minutes max to customize Opera just the way you like it… and you gotta do it once… I don’t see how this is a problem with opera… I remember when I first used it… I was like: WTF is that lil line there? I dont what that kind of toolbar… so I went in the apparence menu and disabled it… thats all!

If you use thunderbird why would you want opera to be your default email client?

Yeah I wish Opera was more addon friendly… I kinda miss this firefox addon that took care of the google image thingny so you can access to the image directly…

I remember firefox’s magnify and I don’t think it was that bad… it’s with the mouse wheel, right?

haha yeah these pages are annoying… and since its so easy to use, sometimes its just better to zoom on that text…

You misunderstood what I said–I worded it poorly.

I’m saying that after you install Opera, you then have to go back to the program that you use as your default email client. When you go to your default email client (thunderbird, OE, etc), it will ask you if you want it to be the default mail client because Opera took that over just out of installing it.

The regular bookmarks pulldown menu needs to be much more powerful–like being able to right click a bookmark and adjust the properties.

Then there’s the RSS feed thing. Awful. I should be able to view it like a webpage just like the other browsers, and I shouldn’t have to subscribe to a feed just to see a couple sentences in it (google often brings up RSS feeds in searches now).

But, as I said, I still use opera as my main browser.

Kizzume, you could give the PageZoom Firefox extension a chance. It’s not as good as in IE or Opera, but it’s working ok for the most tasks.

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/1499

yeah I get it…

yeah I see… but instead of clicking on bookmarks, why dont you just use the panel by pressing f4, and then, f4 again to make it disapear…

Could you give me a link of one of these pages? I wanna see how horible it is…